Transactions are common among businesses and between business departments within a particular business. During any given transaction, these business entities exchange information. For example, during a sales transaction, numerous business entities may be involved, such as a sales entity that sells merchandise to a customer, a financial institution that handles the financial transaction, and a warehouse that sends the merchandise to the customer. The end-to-end business transaction may require a significant amount of information to be exchanged between the various business entities involved. For example, the customer may send a request for the merchandise as well as some form of payment authorization for the merchandise to the sales entity, and the sales entity may send the financial institution a request for a transfer of funds from the customer's account to the sales entity's account.
Exchanging information between different business entities is not a simple task. This is particularly true because the information used by different business entities is usually tightly tied to the business entity itself. Each business entity may have its own program for handling its part of the transaction. These programs differ from each other because they typically are created for different purposes and because each business entity may use semantics that differ from the other business entities. For example, one program may relate to accounting, another program may relate to manufacturing, and a third program may relate to inventory control. Similarly, one program may identify merchandise using the name of the product while another program may identify the same merchandise using its model number. Further, one business entity may use U.S. dollars to represent its currency while another business entity may use Japanese Yen. A simple difference in formatting, e.g., the use of upper-case lettering rather than lower-case or title-case, makes the exchange of information between businesses a difficult task. Unless the individual businesses agree upon particular semantics, human interaction typically is required to facilitate transactions between these businesses. Because these “heterogeneous” programs are used by different companies or by different business areas within a given company, a need exists for a consistent way to exchange information and perform a business transaction between the different business entities.
The United Nations established the United Nations Centre for Trade Facilitation and Electronic Business (“UN/CEFACT”) to improve worldwide coordination for the exchange of information. The primary focus of UN/CEFACT is to facilitate national and international transactions by simplifying and harmonizing processes, procedures and information flow to contribute to the growth of global commerce. UN/CEFACT is still in its early stages of developing such a harmonized system. Additional information regarding UN/CEFACT can be found at www.unece.org/cefact/.
Currently many standards exist, which offer a variety of interfaces used to exchange business information. Most of these interfaces, however, apply to only one specific industry, and are not consistent between the different standards. Moreover, a number of these interfaces are not consistent within an individual standard. Thus, there is a need for the harmonization of interfaces across these standards and across various industries.